Books
Jane Rawson
Human/Nature
The forward slash is the most ambiguous of punctuation marks. Placed between two words it can mean “or”, “and” or “combined with”. Its appearance here, in the title of a series of essays about our vexed relationship to the natural world, is a brutally efficient signal of the author’s intentions. Jane Rawson regards much of our thinking about nature as tangled in a thicket of misconceptions and false binaries. Human/Nature: On life in a wild world is the machete she sharpens to chop us free.
Rawson is a novelist, essayist and editor who in recent years relocated with her partner to rural Tasmania from the mainland. Hers was a move inspired by noble concerns about climate disruption, species extinction and the general political endarkenment. But it is undermined by one glaring, irrefutable truth: she is a creature ill-equipped for non-urban environments.
“I am not a bushwalker,” she writes. “I like art exhibitions and grotty little bars. I have towncraft: I can navigate a metro system, choose an unusual but satisfying combination of dishes from a menu, find a calm place to read a book. I do not have bushcraft. I cannot master the bush, and it feels too dangerous to give myself whatever the bush wants from me.”
It’s a refreshing opening gambit, disarming and warm. If it is true that Rawson lacks easy practical embeddedness in the natural world, she has nonetheless spent decades reading, thinking and writing about “nature”. The question her situation begs is deeply personal but has universal implications: why does one person, so durably and urgently engaged with challenging those forces that threaten the ongoing viability of our planet as a home for the collective flourishing of all life, find herself alienated from the very nature she seeks to defend?
The answer, as it unfolds in the seven chapters that follow her introduction, is rooted in an epigraph from the physicist Werner Heisenberg: “What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Of the many paths Human/Nature travels down – exploring efforts to bring the thylacine back from extinction, worrying at what a “species” really is or whether concrete should be regarded as a “natural” product or how we should calculate the risk of catastrophic fire – the idea of nature as a cultural construct rather than some privileged zone apart from humanity is a constant.
In other words, Jane Rawson is not “bad” at nature, not really. It’s more that Nature has been framed in ways that serve to shut her out of its domain. One foundational example: when the literary eloquence of Scottish–American naturalist and writer John Muir inspired then United States president Teddy Roosevelt to establish five new national parks in the early 20th century, these were founded on the ancestral lands of Indigenous Americans. Human presence in the landscape was erased so that the (white, male, middle-class) visitor might enjoy a sense of the solitary grandeur of an untrammelled scene.
This knowledge makes a certain strain of exquisitely melancholy, masculine-coded nature writing hard for Rawson to read. And Tasmania’s wild places are harder to enjoy in an unconstrained manner when genocide and white supremacy lie at the heart of your inherited environmental politics.
Even on a matter as apparently objective as scientific taxonomy, Rawson shows that loaded perspectives were brought to bear. Carl Linnaeus was obsessed by lactating breasts (hence Mammalia), Charles Darwin was a eugenicist, and even his well-meaning colleague Alfred Russel Wallace expounded a casual racism. These men lived inside old hierarchies. Their research was shaped by presumptions that were encultured and gendered. They pressed old prejudices into the fresh clay of modern science.
Rawson uncovers many such implicit biases when it comes to how we relate and interact with the natural world, though it’s much to her credit that the author is just as quick to acknowledge how her situation might come with its own set of blinkers. At its most generous, Human/Nature sets out to expand the category of nature so that more of those who have been traditionally excluded from the natural world feel they have a stake in it, or at least get a glimpse of it.
Think of Robert Macfarlane’s television documentary The Wild Places of Essex, in which the writer and naturalist looked to the interstitial spaces between town and country in one of the most urbanised counties in England to discover an irrepressible seam of wildness. The quolls that fight or mate beneath Rawson’s floorboards in the Huon Valley, the tiger snake sunning itself on the back step of her home: these are nature too – what Macfarlane calls “the undiscovered country of the nearby”.
There is always a risk with maximal expansiveness: that by including everything that might be nature we evacuate the category of meaning – and by doing so leach it of the power to move people to change the status quo. And while there are moments in Human/Nature where Rawson flirts with the nihilistic “everything bagel vision” of what nature might be, it’s in the spirit of a thought experiment designed to test the boundaries of the possible. Only by testing these might we refresh and reframe a politics designed to preserve what is critical for us all.
As Rawson writes, her book is designed to unsettle assumptions about nature, “to better understand the implications of my values and decisions, to try and see the creatures around me as they really are…” The vulnerability described here is, creditably, hers. But if we, her readers, aspire to her decency and care, then we must embrace her vulnerability as our own.
NewSouth, 224pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 12, 2025 as "Human/Nature".
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